Date: October 29, 1929
On this day with SHAC, Black Tuesday hit the New York City Stock Exchange and Wall Street. As the markets opened on the Tuesday that marked the beginning of the Great Depression, investors traded 16,410,030 shares in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading. With the losses accrued on that day, the United States, as well as the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into what is known today as the Great Depression.
Prior to Black Tuesday and the Great Depression, the stock market of the United States went through a period of rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August of 1929—a time filled with wild speculations of the future. By then however, production had already begun to decline and unemployment was on the rise, leaving stocks in great excess of their real value. Outside of these factors, the causes of the eventual market collapse were low wages, the proliferation of debt, a weak agriculture, and an excess of large bank loans that could not be liquidated.
With these factors beginning to compound, stock prices began to decline in September and early October of 1929, with Oct. 18 standing as the day that the fall began. After this, panic set in, starting on Oct. 24, Black Thursday, and running through to Oct. 29, stocks began to fly off the proverbial shelves, just not in the way they were hoping. Investment companies and leading bankers attempted to stabilize the market by buying up great blocks of stock, producing a moderate rally. However, the storm broke anew, and the market went into a free fall.
After the initial days of the Great Depression, the stocks had nowhere to go but up, and though there was a considerable amount of growth in the weeks following Black Tuesday, stock prices were unable to recover easily. Only World War II and the massive level of armament production taken on by the United States pulled the country out of its slump of Depression, where 30 percent of the workforce was unemployed and stock prices were worth only 20 per cent of their original value.
— Compiled by Alexandra Grant